Air Canada Express Jet Kills Two Crew Members After Striking Fire Truck at LaGuardia

An Air Canada Express regional jet struck a Port Authority fire truck on runway 4 at LaGuardia Airport late Sunday night, killing both pilots and injuring as many as 70 people in a collision that shut down one of the nation's busiest airports for hours.

Flight AC8646, a 20-year-old Bombardier CRJ-900 operated by Jazz Aviation and carrying approximately 76 passengers and four crew members from Montreal, hit the emergency vehicle at roughly 24 miles per hour at 11:38 p.m. local time, according to flight-tracking service Flightradar24. Photos and videos circulated on social media showed severe damage to the nose of the aircraft on a wet runway, with emergency responders surrounding the plane in the hours after the impact.

The pilot and co-pilot were badly injured in the collision and later died, Sky News and NDTV reported. Two Port Authority officers aboard or near the fire truck sustained serious injuries, including broken limbs, and were in stable condition at a hospital, according to multiple reports.

Casualty figures varied across early reports. Wikipedia's compilation of coverage, including NBC News, listed 70 people injured, eight of them critically. Sky News and NDTV reported that 41 passengers and crew members were taken to hospital. The discrepancy likely reflects different tallying points as the situation developed; authorities had not released a consolidated official toll at the time of publication.

A viral audio clip, which NDTV said it could not immediately verify, captured what appeared to be an air traffic controller calling out "Stop, stop, stop" to the truck driver. Other lines in the circulating transcript included a request for "Truck 1 and company" to cross runway 4 at a taxiway intersection designated Delta. Reports attributed the fire truck's runway crossing to a separate emergency involving a United Airlines Boeing 737 MAX parked on the airfield, where a strange odor had reportedly made flight attendants ill and prompted a fire crew response. That account was not independently confirmed.

The FAA issued a ground stop at LaGuardia following the collision. The airport closed at approximately 11:50 p.m. and remained shut for several hours; the ground stop was reported to have been in effect until around 1:30 a.m. local time. The FAA, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Air Canada did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Jazz Aviation operates the CRJ-900 fleet on behalf of Air Canada Express. The aircraft involved, registration C-GNJZ, was delivered new in late 2005 and was approximately 20 years old at the time of the crash.

The incident is under investigation. The National Transportation Safety Board typically takes the investigative lead in U.S. aviation accidents of this nature, and investigators will seek to determine whether the fire truck entered the runway with proper air traffic control clearance and what role, if any, the wet runway conditions played in the sequence of events. Cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder analysis will be central to that inquiry.

LaGuardia handles more than 30 million passengers annually and has no margin for runway incursions given its unusually compact layout, making Sunday night's collision one of the most serious incidents at the airport in decades.